2/2

Your father is unemployed - most of the time. Your mother works part-time as a waitress. You live on a council estate in Mitcham and earn money any way you can - working in the chip shop, delivering newspapers and even hunting through bins for pop bottles to take back to the shop for the deposit.

When you leave school at 16 with just one O-level, your prospects - quite frankly - are not good.

So how do you end up as a multi-millionairess with a respected business empire? Ask Karen Darby - for this rags-to-riches story is her story. The founder of Simply Switch, the service that finds consumers the best deals on everything from energy bills to broadband providers, Karen did not hit on her big idea until the age of 42. It was on the way to a car park - not the most inspirational of places.

A serial entrepreneur, she had already set up a successful call centre and was then running a business training telesales staff when she came up with her big idea.

At a meeting about selling newly de-regulated energy suppliers to households, she advised her client that instead of cold-calling they should shop around to find consumers a cheaper provider - and then earn a fixed-fee from the energy company.

That way consumers would call them.

"They rejected my idea as it wasn't their core business," says Karen. "It was only when I was going to my car, that I realised that I could do it myself. It was absolutely right for the moment and it was such a simple idea. I think it is important that you can explain what you do in 30 seconds."

But it was her drive and determination that made the company the success it is today, with 80 staff taking 1,000 calls a day and sales of £6 million expected this year.

"If the odds are stacked against you - as they are for a lot of entrepreneurs - you have a determination to succeed," says Karen, now 46. "Even at 11 years of age, it dawned on me that you never get rich working for someone else."

Karen, who will be helping to find the winner of the O2 Inspiration Award - recognising London's most inspirational small business of the year - could not have had a more different start in life to Adam Balon, also on our panel of judges and one of the co-founders of innocent, the healthy drinks company.

While Karen left school at 16, Adam and his two fellow founders of the smoothie company went to university and, as Adam says, "made our mothers proud and got good jobs.

"Rich went into advertising and Jon and I went into management consultancy. But we were still always talking about running our own business," says Adam, 34.

"We were all leading busy lives so we asked ourselves what we could do to make them a bit easier. Eating better seemed to be a good start and that's when we came up with the idea for the healthy fruit smoothie," says Adam, who calls himself innocent's Chief Squeezer.

"It was when we were travelling down to the Alps for a skiing holiday that we made the decision to go for it. When we got back, we drew up a business plan and found out as much as we could about fruit. Then, in July 1998, we decided to ask people other than our families what they thought of our idea," says Adam.

"So we bought £500 worth of fruit and took a stand at a West London jazz festival on Parson's Green. Then we put up a big sign that said, 'Do you think that we should give up our day jobs?' and asked people to put their empty bottles in bins marked 'Yes' and 'No'.

By the end of the weekend the 'Yes' bin was full so we went into work on the Monday and handed in our notice."

Like Simply Switch, innocent's success was mainly down to inspiration but had a lot to do with timing. The demand for natural, healthy recipes since the company was launched in 1999 has made innocent one of the fastestgrowing companies of the last decade. It now sells one million smoothies a week, is expected to turnover £75 million this year and employs more than 100 staff.

Adam says Tim Smitt, the environmentalist behind the Eden Project, is one of the people who inspired him most. "He had a clear, brave vision of what he wanted to achieve and he made it happen, with a great outcome." That clear vision - and the ability to make it work - is what we are looking for in the winners of the O2 Inspiration Award.

"We understand the challenges of running your own business and therefore have created the O2 Inspiration Award to recognise and reward the passion and imagination needed to make a small business successful," says Peter Rampling, head of business marketing at O2.

Peter, who has helped to make the mobile phone company the Number 1 choice for small and medium-sized business customers (by number of users) is joined by our fourth judge, Chris Blackhurst, the award-winning Business Editor of the Evening Standard.